Murdoch's Go-To Man in London

Times Editor Thomson
Advises News Corp.
On Dow Jones Courtship

By

Aaron O. Patrick

Updated June 12, 2007 11:59 p.m. ET

LONDON -- For years, as an editor at Pearson PLC's Financial Times,
Robert Thomson
studied The Wall Street Journal and sought ways to beat it.

Now, as editor of the Times of London, he is putting his knowledge to work as an adviser to his boss,
News Corp.
Chairman
Rupert Murdoch,
in his bid for
Dow Jones
& Co., the Journal's owner. Mr. Thomson has flown to New York several times to discuss strategy with Mr. Murdoch, and the two talk on the phone several times a week, people familiar with the situation said.

ENLARGE

Seeing eye to eye: Mr. Murdoch, left, and Mr. Thomson

Mr. Thomson's recommendations include: investing more money in Dow Jones's online assets, which include WSJ.com and MarketWatch.com; and considering charging different prices for access to the company's Web sites, depending on the amount of information readers want, according to a person familiar with his thinking.

Several London newspapers, including the Evening Standard and the Observer, have speculated that Mr. Thomson might take a senior role either at or overseeing the Journal if News Corp.'s bid for Dow Jones is successful. There also is speculation he could assume a senior position at News Corp., which publishes 110 newspapers in Australia, four in the United Kingdom and the New York Post in the U.S.

Asked in a June 1 interview if he would appoint Mr. Thomson publisher of the Journal, Mr. Murdoch said, "I haven't thought about it. It's a new idea to me."

Mr. Thomson said he is very happy at the Times and has "every intention of staying here for a very long time."

Last week, the Bancroft family, which controls Dow Jones, met with Mr. Murdoch for the first time to discuss his $5 billion bid for the company.

Mr. Thomson, 46 years old, also is playing an important public role for Mr. Murdoch: defending how Mr. Murdoch manages serious journalism. One factor that had held back the Bancroft family from talking to Mr. Murdoch was concern about the Journal's editorial independence under News Corp.

Mr. Thomson has stated publicly that Mr. Murdoch doesn't interfere in editorial matters at the Times. When
James H. Ottaway Jr.,
whose family controls about 5% of Dow Jones's shareholder voting power, criticized Mr. Murdoch for what he described as censoring China coverage to protect business interests, it was Mr. Thomson who personally responded in an email and invited Mr. Ottaway to visit the Times's newsroom.

More

Mr. Thomson and Mr. Murdoch have an unusually close relationship, said people who know them both. They share Australian roots and a birthday (March 11, 30 years apart). Both married women from China and have young children. Wendi Murdoch and Mr. Thomson's wife, Wang Ping, get along well and speak Mandarin to each other, say people who know them. The two families have vacationed together.

Kim Fletcher,
a British media commentator and former editor of the Independent on Sunday newspaper, said that sharing vacations represents an "astonishing closeness" between the newspaper owner and his editor. "When Thomson was appointed [Times editor], he was seen to have come from nowhere because he wasn't on the general newspaper scene -- he was from a business-newspaper background," Mr. Fletcher said.

Mr. Thomson grew up in a working-class family in the Australian bush and got his first full-time job at age 17 in 1979 at Melbourne's Herald, an evening paper once edited by Mr. Murdoch's father, Sir Keith Murdoch. Mr. Thomson missed out on a position as a trainee journalist and became an errand boy instead. A year later, he became a reporter. At night, he studied for his journalism degree at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

In the early 1980s, he moved to the Sydney Morning Herald. Through a sharing arrangement with the Financial Times, the paper sent him to Beijing as a reporter. In 1989, Mr. Thomson covered the crushing of the Tiananmen Square democracy protests by the Chinese army. He was in the square when a group of soldiers started beating up another reporter, Jonathan Mirsky of Britain's Observer newspaper. Mr. Thomson helped pull away Mr. Mirsky, both men recall.

The Financial Times's foreign editor at the time,
Andrew Gowers,
hired Mr. Thomson as his No. 2 in 1994. Mr. Thomson rose through the editing ranks and, four years later, was named managing editor of the paper's U.S. edition. His role: carve a bigger, more visible role for the FT in a market dominated by The Wall Street Journal. The FT's circulation in the U.S. was just 45,000 copies a day, a spokeswoman for Mr. Thomson said. Mr. Thomson thought he could attract new, wealthy readers by publishing more international business news. By 2002, U.S. circulation had increased to 150,000 copies, though still far behind the Journal's 1.7 million.

In 2001, the editor's job at the Financial Times opened up. Mr. Gowers, who was more experienced at the FT, got the job, a deep disappointment to Mr. Thomson, according to people who know him.

A few months later, Mr. Gowers flew to New York to check on the paper's operations. Mr. Thomson, who had become acquainted with a variety of media executives during his time in New York, organized a get-to-know-you lunch at News Corp.'s headquarters for Mr. Gowers with Mr. Murdoch, his son Lachlan and a few others. To the surprise of Mr. Gowers, Mr. Thomson and Mr. Murdoch started joking around, said Mr. Gowers, now head of corporate communications, advertising and brand and marketing strategy for Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in Europe.

"I saw the body language" between them, Mr. Gowers said. "It was more than a spark." Two months later, Mr. Murdoch appointed Mr. Thomson editor of the Times.

When Mr. Thomson arrived at the Times in 2002, some 21 years after News Corp. acquired the paper, he set out to improve foreign and business coverage.

Mr. Thomson also tackled the Times's losses by increasing the paper's cover price to 65 pence ($1.28) from 40 pence, and cutting back on discounted subscriptions. In 2004, he converted the paper to a tabloid from a broadsheet. The strategy appears to be working. In 2004, the Times had an $89 million loss, according to a person familiar with its accounts. Next year, the paper is expected to make a profit, this person said.

"Rupert Murdoch gets little credit for seeing the Times through the difficult years," Mr. Thomson said in an email. "It's fair to say that we are famous for being a not-for-profit" organization, he jokes. The Times has lost money for most of the time it has been owned by Mr. Murdoch, according to several former editors.

Tall, thin and with a slight stoop because of a back problem, Mr. Thomson is approachable and rarely shows anger, said people who have worked with him. With a soft voice and an eccentric style of dress -- he is fond of thin ties -- he stood out in the newsroom, said people who have worked with him.

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